________________________________________________________________________ Call for Papers Special Session on "Learning and Adapting in AI Planning" at IC-AI 2001 Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, June 25-28, 2001 http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mg343/AI-session.htm ________________________________________________________________________ A Special Session on "Learning and Adapting in AI Planning" will take place at the Monte Carlo Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada (USA), during June 25-28, as part of the 2001 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IC-AI'2001, held in conjunction with the International Multiconference: http://www.ashland.edu/~iajwa/conferences/). Scope and Overview: ------------------ The past few years have seen dramatic advances in planning algorithms and paradigms. Recent systems can quickly solve problems that are orders of magnitude harder than those tackled by the best previous planners. However, if planning systems are to find wide application in real-world situations, they need to be able to offer good quality, real-time performances over a large range of problems. The thesis underlying this session is that in order to do so, not only must planners be fast, but also be flexible and able to adapt automatically to different problems and domains. Two current approaches tackling this issue from different perspectives are: 1) the automatic extraction of domain-specific knowledge through domain analysis, and 2) the acquisition of domain-specific or search-control knowledge and procedural abstractions through the employment of learning techniques. In order to discuss the state of the art of these areas of research and stimulate their cross-fertilisation, we invite submissions of papers on one or both of these approaches. More specifically, topics of particular interest concern the development of planning systems or algorithms that can learn from past experience, and/or automatically analyse and adapt to new problem domains, in order to 1) offer good performances over a wide range of different situations or 2) improve efficiency or plan quality on the basis of failures and successes. Topics will include (but not be limited to): - inference of invariants through domain analysis and hypothesis testing; - acquisition of domain knowledge in incomplete or inaccurate domains; - acquisition of strategies for action selection; - acquisition of heuristics for state-space or plan-space search; - learning macro-operators; - learning plan-rewriting rules; - reinforcement learning for conformant and stochastic planning; - integration of planning, learning and execution; and, in general, the use of any learning technique (such as explanation-based, inductive, supervised, analytic or by-analogy learning) for improvement and optimisation of current state-of-the-art planning systems. Submission Guidelines: --------------------- Prospective authors are invited to submit their draft papers (about 4 or 5 single-spaced pages) to the Session Chair, Dr. Max Garagnani (address given below) by ** MARCH 1, 2001 **. The first page of the draft paper should include: title of the paper, name, affiliation, postal address, telephone number, Fax and e-mail address of each author. The first page should also specify the name of the Contact Author and a maximum of 5 keywords. Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be sent to the e-mail address of the Contact Author by April 1, 2001. The length of the Camera-Ready papers (if accepted) will be limited to 7 pages. Papers must not have been previously published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Electronic submission is preferred. Papers can be submitted via e-mail or made available on the web. In both cases, documents should be in ZIPPED PostScript / PDF format and be named "author.zip", using the name of the Contact Author. An e-mail message containing either the file or its URL address (e.g. http://..../author.zip) should reach the Session Chair by Thursday 1st March, 2001. If electronic submission is not possible, three hard copies should reach the Session Chair by the same date. Notice that the final version of accepted papers must be made available in PostScript, PDF, or source form. We strongly encourage to use LaTeX for the preparation of papers. Other formats are likely to be troublesome. Evaluation Process: ------------------ Papers will be evaluated for originality, relevance, significance, soundness and clarity. Each paper will be refereed by (at least) two researchers in the topical area; written reviews will be returned to authors. The Camera-Ready papers will be reviewed by one person. Accepted papers are expected to be presented at IC-AI 2001 during the Special Session. Publication: ----------- Accepted papers will be published under the title of the Session in the IC-AI 2001 Conference Proceedings. The Proceedings will be published by CSREA Press (ISBN) in hardcopy and will be available at the Conference. After the conference, some Sessions will be considered for publication as Special Issues in appropriate journals. Important Dates: --------------- - March 1, 2001 (Thursday): Draft papers (about 4 to 5 pages) due - April 1, 2001 (Sunday): Notification of acceptance/rejection - May 1, 2001 (Tuesday): Camera-Ready papers and Pre-registration due - June 25 - 28, 2001: Special Session & IC-AI Conference Location: -------- The Special Session will be held in the Monte Carlo Resort Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. This is a mega hotel with excellent conference facilities and over 3,000 rooms. The Hotel is minutes from the Las Vegas airport, and offers many vacation and recreational attractions, including: waterfalls, casino, spa, pools & kiddie pools, sunning decks, Easy River water ride, wave pool with cascades, lighted tennis courts, health spa (with workout equipment, whirlpool, sauna, ...), arcade virtual reality game rooms, nightly shows, snack bars, a number of restaurants, shopping area, bars, ... Many of these attractions are open 24 hours a day and most are suitable for families and children. The negotiated hotel's room rate for conference attendees is very reasonable (79USD + tax) per night (no extra charge for double occupancy) for the duration of the conference. International Program Committee: ------------------------------- Ricardo Aler Mur, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) Mike Barley, University of Auckland (New Zealand) Jim Blythe, USC/Information Science Institute (USA) Barbara Engelhardt, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA) Maria Fox, University of Durham (UK) Alfonso Gerevini, University of Brescia (Italy) Henry Kautz, University of Washington, Seattle (USA) Sven Koenig, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) John Levine, University of Edinburgh (UK) Derek Long, University of Durham (UK) Lee McCluskey, University of Huddersfield (UK) Peter Stone, AT&T Labs (USA) All submissions, queries or comments should be mailed or e-mailed to the Session Chair: Dr. Max Garagnani Department of Computing The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA U.K. Phone: +44 (0)1908 654812 Secr.: +44 (0)1908 653037 Fax: +44 (0)1908 652140 E-mail: M.Garagnani@open.ac.uk URL: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mg343 ************************************************************************ ------------------- MLnet community list http://www.mlnet.org/mlnet2/services/mlnet-community.html